Five ways to tame your martech Frankenstack

Martech solutions should help you better connect with your audience and drive business growth. In reality, they often lead to a bloated, disjointed “Frankenstack” that creates more problems than it solves.

You end up with overlapping, siloed tools that drain your budget. Your customer data is exposed to risks through poorly integrated systems. And your team is wasting their time managing tech instead of delivering results.

To help you avoid this trap, we’ve identified five different methods for taming your Frankenstack and taking back control.

1. Work around the dreaded “re-platforming”

When your martech stack’s a mess, a complete overhaul can seem like the only path forward. Terrifying!

Instead of looking at it as an all-or-nothing situation, tackle it as a step-by-step process. Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium, believes it is important to focus on “delivering value within a quarter of the year,” rather than committing to a massive, multi-million dollar project that could take months to even get started.

“I would challenge how we think about replatforming nowadays… the way we should be improving that Frankenstack is to always look at things iteratively.” – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

Here are some quick wins to look out for:

• Check if your current tools still align with your business goals. If not, they should be on the chopping block.
• See if any licenses are nearing their expiration date. Are they worth renewing or could you win back some wasted budget?
• Consider the cost of running each tool, including hosting and support. Are the returns outweighing the costs?
• Think about how much developer assistance each tool needs. Can your team operate independently to speed things up and reduce budget spend?

Looking at these areas will help you methodically “prune” your tech stack – cutting out or replacing what’s not working, rather than ripping everything out and starting over. As we like to put it…

“You don’t throw away the entire car when you need new tires; you just get the new tire.”

2. Explore the power of composability

When building or refining your tech stack, composability is key. A composable digital experience platform (DXP) offers a ‘build-your-own-adventure’ approach to crafting digital experiences.

A composable approach allows you to handpick the perfect blend of capabilities and technologies – easily adding, removing, and updating them so that creating advanced digital experiences becomes a breeze.

Composability also supports our first point around re-platforming,  Wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch is just not practical. Instead, composability allows you to focus on what’s working and simply adjust the parts that aren’t.

This approach keeps your business agile and adaptable, enabling you to:

• Add or remove components as needed.
• Integrate and deploy faster.
• Improve resilience and adaptability.
• Increase scalability.
• Reduce technical debt.

Also, rest easy knowing your digital experiences are covered by built-in security and governance – even your third-party applications.

Instead of using fragile integrations that have to be managed individually and break easily,  the Squiz DXP ensures you can manage all integrations from one platform and maintain the security across all.

“We all tend to overanalyze and get scared to make a move. The exciting thing for me as a marketer is that – worst case scenario – with composable software, you can get to that fast fail. So at least you haven’t spent a year on a project that then under-delivers.”  – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

3. Make regular evaluation a priority

To keep your tech stack under control and functioning smoothly, you need good governance and evaluation practices in place.

Conduct an annual evaluation of what you've got, how it's all serving your needs, and do that from various perspectives.

Here are four steps to that evaluation process:

1. Audit your tools to determine if they are effectively and efficiently doing what they should be for the business.
2. Define clear criteria for selecting and retaining tools – like being able to adapt and grow with you, or not jumping in price every 12 months.
3. Engage key stakeholders in the process, because change management is a critical part of ensuring any tech is implemented and adopted well.
4. Pay close attention to data privacy, security, and the ongoing costs of maintaining your tools. Are they up to scratch, keeping you safe and protecting customer data?

“It's about what's working, right? If something is working well and there's not a lot of risks running it, you don’t necessarily need to change it.” – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

4. Empower your people

No matter how advanced your tech stack is, its success will ultimately depend on the people using it. Technology alone isn't enough – your team needs to be equipped and empowered to make the most of it.

“You can’t just train people for a week, give them a quiz, and call it done – that’s not real training, and it’s not how you enable a team.” – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

Here’s how to best support your people:

• Go beyond basic functionality. Help your team understand the broader context of how tools fit into their work and how they can get the most out of them.
• Create a supportive learning environment by encouraging experimentation and learning over time. This helps your team adapt to new tools and processes, building confidence and expertise, gradually.
• Foster strong collaboration between marketing and IT so they can align on goals and leverage each other's strengths. Marketing can define what’s needed to create engaging customer experiences, while IT can help get those tools implemented effectively and securely.

“When marketing and IT teams get really connected, cool stuff happens.” – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

5. Don’t leave any (cost) stones unturned

The cost of your martech stack isn’t the upfront price tag. To get the full picture, you need to conduct a thorough total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis.

“It’s about looking at what it costs you to support this internally, what it costs to host it, and what it’s maybe costing you in terms of risk if something is nearing end-of-life.” – Samantha Goble, VP Digital at XCentium.

When conducting a TCO analysis, make sure to:

• Look beyond license fees to include support, hosting, and opportunity costs.
• Consider the risks associated with outdated or poorly supported tools.
• Be cautious of productivity calculations that seem overly optimistic or fluffy – focus on tangible, measurable improvements.

Stay curious – anytime someone wants you to calculate a productivity factor like ‘your people will save 30 minutes a week,’ be skeptical. Look at hard costs instead, like whether you can reduce headcount or cut specific expenses. By taking a holistic approach to cost assessment, you’ll get a clearer picture of the real value your martech investments bring and uncover any hidden costs that might not be immediately obvious.

To wrap it up

Managing your martech stack is about so much more than just picking the right tools. Done right, it’s about making sure everything works together smoothly and is supporting your team and their work.

Take things one step at a time, seek out and embrace composability, and keep an eye on the overall costs. But most importantly, remember that your tech is only as good as the people using it. Invest in their growth, encourage collaboration, and keep learning at the heart of your strategy. With the right approach, your martech stack will become a key part of your organization’s growth.

Samantha Goble talks more about taming the Frankenstack on LinkedIn.